Fr Brian Lennon SJ takes issue with the Catholic position on the ordination of women to the priesthood (The Irish Catholic, 12/2/2026).
In making his case, Fr Lennon begins with an emotional appeal. A female chaplain can comfort a dying patient only to the point of giving them the Sacrament of the Sick. Then she must call a priest who is “unknown” to the patient. Sadly, at the end of life those who surround us with ministrations, both spiritual and medical, are often “unknown”. The best we can expect beyond professional care is that they are kind and sensitive. A lay female chaplain, who in any case may not wish for ordination even if it was open to her, is replaced by a priest just as a familiar doctor will step aside for an “unknown” consultant.
Challenge
Fr Lennon moves from his opening, emotive attack to challenge John Paul II’s final word on the question which was that “the church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women . . . and that this judgment is to be held definitively by all the Church’s faithful”. Fr Lennon bends these words immediately to assert that John Paul is overreaching his authority by claiming, without foundation, that “God has mandated it”. There is an arrogance in this reformulation that is not to be found in the Pope’s own words. He is not misusing his power as pope but doing rather the opposite by pointing out that both scripture and tradition have left no door open on the question and he, just like his predecessors, is powerless to make a change.
John Paul is doing no more than exercising Christ’s mandate to preserve and preach the Gospel, under the Lord’s pledge that ‘he who hears you, hears me’”
Pope John Paul was not, as Fr Lennon claims, putting forward a “thesis” that did not meet “the church’s bar for infallibility”, as if the Pope’s words were just personal rumination which the faithful could take or leave. In fact, papal infallibility, defined only in 1870, covers very little indeed of what popes teach and have taught across the centuries. John Paul is doing no more than exercising Christ’s mandate to preserve and preach the Gospel, under the Lord’s pledge that “he who hears you, hears me” (Luke 10:16). In fact the doctrinal status of John Paul’s words is moot in any case as he is not proposing any new doctrine but rather defending long established practice and understanding. On the other hand, if Fr Lennon and those of his persuasion were to have their way, there would be far more reason to say they were exceeding authority.
Filters
Fr Lennon again puts his own ideological filters on the arguments for the status quo allowing him to dismiss them as weak and even “crude”. He is right in saying the defence for the exclusion of women from ordination rests significantly on the imagery of Christ as bridegroom. He does not mention the wedding feast theme in the parables or the significance of Cana and marriage in St John’s Gospel and how it runs like a leitmotif in scripture, right through to the final lines of John’s Revelation where the Evangelist speaks of the Church as ‘the bride’. That point aside, Fr Lennon contends that imagery is incidental and Christ might have chosen other metaphors to express his relationship with his people. This is a fundamental category error for those who have developed a positive theology on the question of women and ordination.
God’s truth is in his words of which imagery is an intrinsic part. His words cannot be split from his meaning or his actions. In fact, the whole of revelation is a closely woven text to be pondered as one integrated whole. The images of wheat and wine, planting and harvesting and wedding feasts become the sacramental signs which we carefully observe two thousand years after he instituted them.
To say that women are precluded from ‘representing Christ’ in the Catholic church because they have not the male ‘wherewithal’ for ordination is clearly untrue”
Within this frame, the male priest who presides ‘in persona Christi’ is himself a sign as he uses the words of the Lord in consecration or absolution. Reverence for this sign, like all the other signs, symbols and rituals, given to us by Jesus and preserved by sacred tradition, has nothing to do with exclusionary sexism or misogyny. To say that women are precluded from “representing Christ” in the Catholic church because they have not the male “wherewithal” for ordination is clearly untrue. Baptism, as Fr Lennon acknowledges, makes both women and men representatives of Christ in a wide variety of ways. Women are not less so or men more so because their roles in this one single respect don’t overlap. In the abundance of ministries and charisms that sustain a church everyone has a role that no other can fulfil. As St Paul pointed out in his first letter to the Corinthians, it is the same Spirit that breathes through all. There isn’t a hierarchy of gifts unless it is a hierarchy that reverses the worldly order and places the gifts of heart and humility before those of intellect and pride.
The case for the ordination of women generally rests on worldly notions of equality and inclusion and Fr Lennon’s views fall into the usual pattern. For Christ, the one who serves, who becomes the servant is greater than the one he serves. Lowliness is not littleness in the eyes of God. Quite the opposite, in fact. “New awareness of patriarchy and gender” in our levelling culture is driven by a Marxist vision for an enforced equality that is found neither in the Gospel nor in the cosmic grammar we are able to decode.
Binary
The binary dynamic of giving and receiving, the dance between the one who moves and the one who receives is found deep in the biostructure of living things from the neutrons and electrons of cells to the sperm’s encounter with the ovum. God’s breath first moves over the waters and stirs it into life. At the appointed time, divinity moves towards connection with humanity and is received by those “with ears to hear”. We can see the same life-giving, creative embrace in spousal love. We can say with certainty that Christ’s choice of imagery to describe his relationship with his Church was intentional and irreplaceable. He is the Logos; his word is part of his reality.
Yes, Church teaching develops but it’s an organically unfolding development. It’s about discovering and probing what’s given, not about grafting on secular memes about ‘patriarchy and gender’. The Church does not have the authority to do that. Fr Lennon falls back on arguments from silence in his final pitch. The Gospels have nothing to say about slavery just as they have nothing to say about women’s ordination, he notes. The silence on both is of a very different kind. It was Christians who led the abolition movement because they saw it as a sign of contradiction with the Gospel message of love and service to “the least of my brethren” (Matthew 25:40). They also came to see how it jarred with other texts including Paul’s rejection of distinctions based on race and class in the eyes of God (Galatians 3:28). In fact Scripture is one unfolding trove of knowledge that like all God’s words, “yields its fruits in due season” (Psalm 1).
Fr Lennon asks, “can we be certain that God does not want them (women) to do this (serve as priests)?” My question is, would God have left us with this question if it was his plan for his Church? Looking to what Fr Lennon calls a “sister church”, the COE, and bearing in mind the Lord’s counsel that “you will know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16) we see Archbishop Sarah Mullaly presiding over rapidly disintegrating communities that has long made the Marxist programme of collapsing all meaningful distinctions its driving mission, resulting in fragmentation and strife on many fronts.
The synodal path is indeed an opportunity to explore more positive, creative pathways for human flourishing in both society and church.
Margaret Hickey is a regular contributor to various Catholic journals including The Key and Position Papers in Ireland. She lives in Blarney.
